Writing tips
If you thought the problem with Twitter is that there's not enough self-promotion and logrolling, then you are in luck: On Thursday, the company introduced a new feature called "Tip Jar," which allows users to send money directly to other users (though it is currently it's limited to a small number of Twitter-anointed "creators, journalists, experts, and nonprofits" who write in English). This is both a look back to the Tip Jars that were scattered among blogs in the 2000s and a look forward to so-called Web3, which foretells an internet on which all content circulation is intrinsically monetized.
Twitter claims this is a response to how much solicitation was already happening on the site:
We $ee you – sharing your PayPal link after your Tweet goes viral, adding your $Cashtag to your profile so people can support your work, dropping your Venmo handle on your birthday or if you just need some extra help. You drive the conversation on Twitter and we want to make it easier for you to support each other beyond Follows, Retweets, and Likes.
Money here is conflated with attention metrics, a tacit admission of the means by which the company monetizes the work of its users: Follows, retweets, and likes are the currency Twitter uses not only to emotionally attach users to the rituals of content creation and filtering, but also to help structure and measure the buckets of attention it auctions off to advertisers. How users tip each other will also be useful information in that regard, and it will also ease any pressure on Twitter to pay its user-workers itself. Instead Twitter will invite its de facto workforce to dutifully pay each other while it continues to skim off the top. It's as if waiters had to pool "tips" that came out of their own pocket.
Proponents of these kinds of payment schemes like to tout them as empowering consumers to thoughtfully "share the love" or "show their appreciation." What could be wrong with being appreciative? With telling someone they're special? Here's Twitter's rendition of this, for example: "Tip Jar is an easy way to support the incredible voices that make up the conversation on Twitter. This is a first step in our work to create new ways for people to receive and show support on Twitter – with money." These kinds of statements always remind me of this celebration of the bourgeois public sphere: "It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.'" Monetizing "the conversation" participates in this grand tradition.
As a practice, tipping has a deplorable history — Michelle Alexander describes it here as a legacy of feudalism and slavery, and notes its fundamentally sexist and racist logic. It mainly persists, of course, as a way for employers to underpay employees, but it also demoralizes workers and exposes them to cruel, petty, and prejudicial forms of constant judgment when it's not arbitrarily devaluing their labor with the whimsical contingencies of a wage that's characterized not as something that they are entitled to but as a favor granted to them. Any expansion of tipping as a practice further entrenches an unjust system that frames certain people's work as something another class of consumers are entitled to.
The Twitter Tip Jar is also part of a phenomenon that Vox's Terry Nguyen describes here as "ambient shopping." Just as a variety of "buy it now" buttons have popped up across social media platforms, the Twitter tip jar is, in a sense, a way to buy a person's attention — as when vloggers shout out their tippers during a live stream. More than that, it gives the consumption of information in platforms more of the feel of shopping, placing reading or viewing content within the perhaps more familiar or comfortable frame of being a sovereign consumer satisfying one's individualized needs. This is less a matter of, as Nguyen puts it, "convincing users to shift from a social mindset to a consumer one" than of making those two things simultaneous and indistinguishable: Sociality is expressed through micropayments; shopping is a matter of public acts of buying attention. Online audiences are just retail foot traffic.
The Tip Jar, like the other "creator economy" tools, helps convert forms of sociality explicitly into commerce so that eventually we won't recognize something as social unless we're spending money. If I can't immediately buy what I see someone is wearing, are we even friends?